The sorting of commands into subsections is also currently done in three places: darcsman.hs, darcs.tex and "darcs help" (without an argument), and --help-man would allow me to put it in just one place.

I have a problem with markdown having VERY limited kinds of markup, being line-oriented (no hard wrapping) and using raw HTML to do anything remotely complicated -- meaning that it's very difficult to get decent print (PDF) output, except using the evil, inferior via-HTML method (e.g. Prince XML).

A changelog serves two purposes: firstly, it records ALL changes; secondly, it summarizes user-visible changes. Since "darcs changes" provides the former, I think a NEWS file would be the most useful thing (i.e. the latter).